Last time, Rhine takes her only action in the basement so far – she wiggles free long enough to stick the IV back in.
But thank god, the author realized it’s the end of the book and Rhine has to actually accomplish something. So now Rhine wiggles free again and takes out all the needles, then crawls over to the water pitcher.

It’s the only pretty thing in this room, light blue with a diamond texture that reminds me of the pool water breaking in the sunlight.

Evil Mad Scientist is going to learn now why you don’t put fancy breakable stuff in your prisons but stick to plastics.

I’ll never leave the mansion. I’ll never find my brother or see Gabriel again. I’ve accepted that. But I cannot take another minute as one of Vaughn’s experiments. Cannot bear the thought of him finding me no matter where I go. If I can cut this tracker out of my leg, I know I can find a hiding place. There is a man thrashing through the lilies in the hologram; I could let him kill me. Or I could wander the hallways until I’ve found a dark place to die quietly. If I’m lucky, I’ll decompose before Vaughn finds me, and I’ll be too far gone for him to dissect what’s left.

So in the end, Rhine is only allowed action once she’s accepted how futile and helpless she is. Considering how insanely long it took Evil Mad Scientist to track her down, she could probably avoid him the rest of her life by just not staying in the same building for a month. She probably doesn’t even need to leave Manhattan, just move around more.

But anyway she shatters the pretty pitcher and uses one of the shards to hack open her thigh.

The deadliness of thigh injuries is one of those things a lot of people don’t appreciate. Looking at it, it seems like it’s just a bunch of flesh and muscle, with none of those important vital organs. Except for the giant oops you just bled to death artery in it.

Strangely, the book might actually know this. I can’t tell for sure, it may just be the author’s drama sense, but Cecily shows up in time to be horrified at the blood everywhere.

She’s trying to take the glass from my fist, and then she’s trying to stop the bleeding with her open fingers, and she won’t listen to a word I’m saying about it not being safe for her here and the tracker needing to be bled out.

So Rhine seems to have forgotten what she was doing halfway through but hey, blood loss makes you stupid.

Cecily, in contrast, is clear headed enough to realize that if she stays with Rhine she’ll die, and tears herself away long enough to run for help. Which is Rapist-chan. Also, somehow the baby’s here. Maybe he was carrying the baby when she got him?

Anyway, Rapist-chan is all upset.

“How long has she been here?” he demands. “Why wasn’t I told?”

So sure, Cecily said that Rapist-chan didn’t want her down there, but nope, Rapist-chan just had no idea. If only Cecily hadn’t been so terrible and had just told her loving husband Rhine would’ve been rescued.

Rhine then rambles to herself that she can’t escape Evil Mad Scientist with the tracker because as long as he has that He can lure me to his laboratory like a fish caught on a hook so like lighthouses, Rhine doesn’t understand how luring works.

I feel Cecily pacing. Her voice is squeaky and panicked. She is saying to Vaughn, “You said you wouldn’t hurt her! You said she’d be safe!”
“You knew about this?” Linden growls at her. The color in my eyelids becomes angry orange.
Cecily is in hysterics. All she can manage is, “I—I . . .”

There we go. It’s always really Cecily’s fault.

“You had no right, Father,” Linden snaps. “She isn’t your guinea pig. Under this roof she is still my wife!”

“Get your own wife to torture to death instead!”

Evil Mad Scientist continues to explain that this is all personally reasonable and by the way his nightmare drugs boost the immune system.

“Don’t just stand there like a pair of idiots; you heard my husband,” Cecily says over the baby’s screams. “Get the car.

So it seems that, inexplicably, somehow the son and not the father owns everything. Also, that he’s just too damn impotent to use that power and if it wasn’t for Cecily Rhine would just bleed out while the two argue.

But Rapist-chan leaves with her so obviously he’s the real hero of all this. Rhine babbles that his dad is following her and all this and he doesn’t believe her, so she just begs him not to leave her and he promises not to and my only consolation here is at least the book’s almost over so there’s not room for more than another chapter worth of Rapist-chan savior of the universe.

Now that it’s pointless, Rhine suddenly discovers she has a spine and violently fights the new doctors trying to help, because before she could barely crawl, but drugs plus god knows how long unmoving in a bed plus massive blood loss is obviously no problem. All that extra blood was just weighing her down.

Linden catches my fist midair and then holds it, strokes the length of my arm. All the fight leaves me. I’m a whimpering mess.

I hate this book so much.